Vicki Mahaffey

Winner of the American Conference on Irish Studies’ Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature Part of James Joyce’s genius was his ability to find the poetry in everyday life. For Joyce, even a simple object like a table becomes magical, “a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.” How might we learn to regain some of the child-like play with language and sense of delight in the ordinary that comes so naturally to Joyce? The Joyce of Everyday Life teaches us how to interpret seemingly mundane objects and encounters with openness and active curiosity in order to attain greater self-understanding and a fuller appreciation of others. Through a close examination of Joyce's joyous, musical prose, this book shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, and everchanging world. Acclaimed Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey demonstrates how his writing might prompt us to engage in a different kind of reading, treating words and fiction as tools for expanding the boundaries of the self with humor and feeling. A book for everyone who loves language, The Joyce of Everyday Life is a lyrical romp through quotidian existence.

The Joyce of Everyday Life

Joseph Valente

Kezia Whiting

This volume proposes to honor the trenchant, influential scholarship of Professor Margot Norris in essays that amplify her illumination of Joyce’s oeuvre. The common denominator running through her work is her openness to Joyce’s various modes of innovation; she pioneered alternative ways of regarding his fiction, the readers it addresses, the narrative and generic forms it alters, the world to which it refers, and the nature of the socio-historical status quo it exposes. These categories anchor and organize the collection: Joyce’s textual plurivalence, formal innovations, possible worlds, emergent histories (including those of women), and variegated readerships.

Joycean Possibilities: A Margot Norris Legacy

This inclusive guide to Modernist literature considers the ‘high’ Modernist writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Yeats alongside women writers and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Challenges the idea that Modernism was conservative and reactionary. Relates the modernist impulse to broader cultural and historical crises and movements. Covers a wide range of authors up to the outbreak of World War II, among them Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Langston Hughes, Samuel Beckett, HD, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys. Includes coverage of women writers and gay and lesbian writers.

Challenging Fictions?

Modernist Literature

This book is an intimate study of the three giants in Irish literary history: Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. In addition to constructing a narrative of Irelands political and literary past, Vicki Mahaffey interweaves the lives and writing of the authors into a portrait of national imagination, shaped not only by a vast cultural and mythic heritage, but also by the hard fact of English political domination. States of Desire argues that what people desire is fundamentally connected to how they write and read. Not only do language and narrative shape desire (and vice versa), but because these processes are socially conditioned, some political circumstances, such as those present in Ireland at the turn of the century, foster experimental desire more successfully than others. Mahaffey's contribution to the critical discourse on literary modernism is to assign a political motive to the art of modernist wordplay; in doing so, she offers a more compelling and socially driven version of the oft-told tale of literary modernism. Irish writers, she argues, sought to disrupt the rigidity of political thinking and social control by turning language into a weapon; by opening up infinite new possibilities of meaning and association, linguistic play makes it impossible for thought to be monopolized by the state or any other institutional power. In this light, the text becomes a prism of political, cultural, and erotic desires: a fountain of conscious and unconscious linguistic suggestion. Defying semantic control and refuting societal repression, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce literally fought, in their lives and in their work, for a freedom of expression which--as was painfully evidenced in the case of Wilde--was not to be had for the asking.

Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment

States of Desire

Gale Researcher Guide for: James Joyce's Dubliners: Living Halfway is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Gale Researcher Guide for: James Joyce's Dubliners: Living Halfway

In this collection, Joyce experts from around the world have collaborated with one another to produce a set of essays that stage or result from dialogue between different points of view. The result is a sequence of lively discussions about Joyce’s most accessible and widely read set of vignettes about Dublin life at the turn of the century.

Vicki Mahaffey

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